Wild Child: Thirty years after her death, the spirit of the young, stylish, improbably beautiful Talitha Getty wafts through the spring collections in an aura of sandalwood and champagne.

From: W | Date: December 1, 2001 | Author: West, Kevin
Today she would be 60, and no doubt still attractive, in the way that those rare women are who don't need the mere dew of youth in order to captivate. But in the late Sixties, Talitha Getty was an irresistible beauty with an antelope grace, almond-shaped eyes and a mercurial sense of style. She donned dramatic kimonos and shoulder-sweeping earrings to pad barefoot across the black-and-white marble floors of the Roman palazzo apartment she created with her husband, J. Paul Getty Jr., a son of Getty Oil founder John Paul Getty During their few years together, the young Gettys--with their dazzling combination of beauty, charm, money, style and notoriety--blew across Europe as the freest spirits in an age of free spirits.

A single picture tells the story best. On the roof of their Marrakech palace, Paul stands in the background in a djellaba and Talitha lounges in a flowing caftan and gaucho pants--probably stoned out of her mind on everything the Sixties had to offer--as Patrick Lichfield captures images that were to define the decadent fantasy of the rich hippie. It was a style she made her own, tossing together Yves Saint Laurent, Palestinian wedding dresses, Ossie Clark, Valentino couture, Balinese wraps, little white leather boots and piles of fake jewelry with a bohemian aplomb that Kate Moss might envy Diana Vreeland thought she was terrific.

But it didn't last long. Talitha's incandescent flight among the stars of La Dolce Vita and Swinging London burnt out in 1971, when she died in Rome of a heroin overdose. "I knew the youthfulness of the Sixties," Saint Laurent said in 1984. "Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakech, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future."
This season, their spirit is back in the European collections. Talitha was clearly the woman afoot on the runways at Chloe and Dries Van Noten. From the obscurity of a half-remembered Sixties beauty, she had been resurrected as the muse of the season. At Chloe, Phoebe Philo created a tiny, monkey-embroidered bikini and some abbreviated crocheted dresses that Talitha might have worn, while Van Noten, for his part, registered her influence with djellabas and layered dresses. At Yves Saint Laurent, Tom Ford showed some leopard-patterned dresses and caftans that suggested her style, as did some of Marc Jacobs' evening looks for Louis Vuitton.

Philo wasn't even born until two years after Talitha's death, but she, too, had memorized that iconic image of Talitha and Getty on the roof in Marrakech. If anything, the designer says, she initially resisted building a collection around the photo because it was already so famous. "She's a little bit like Jackie O, in that she's an obvious reference to use because we all know it so well," says Philo. She wanted to give her Chloe presentation, held at the Carreau du Temple in Paris' Marais neighborhood, the "sexy but slightly dirty" feel of travel to exotic destinations.

But as she combed through pictures of the Gettys abroad, Philo started to spin out a glamorous fashion movie, based on the true story of Talitha. Her distinctive taste might be called "couture in the souks" because, despite her friendships with Saint Laurent and Valentino, Talitha never let any one designer take control of her wardrobe. "That makes her more attractive as a muse," Philo explains. "When you use Audrey Hepburn, who was so linked with Givenchy, you feel like you're copying another designer instead of using her own personal style. Talitha didn't seem to wear head-to-toe looks. She mixed and matched."

Above all, it was the whole rich-hippie lifestyle that gave Philo the most inspiration. One of her favorite images was of Talitha and Getty in a Mediterranean village where, the designer thought, they may--or may not--have crossed paths with another Chloe muse of the season, Brigitte Bardot. "I guess you could say that I got carried away with Talitha's character," acknowledges Philo. "Not that all of what I imagined about her was even true. I used her more as a fantasy to dream about."

Still, the bare facts of Talitha's life are fantastic enough, even by the trippy standards of the Sixties. She could have been a Godard heroine--or some far-out chick dreamed up by Antonioni. She was born Talitha Pol on Bali of Dutch parents (her grandfather was painter Augustus John). According to London antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, who was among the Gettys' dose friends in the late Sixties, she was briefly held in an internment camp as a child and came to London only after her mother died, to be raised in a bohemian milieu by her father's new wife's family.

In her childhood, Talitha seems to have imbibed an exotic sensuality from the East. In England, she learned to be wild, and when she hit the heady scene there as a teenager, wise old men and feckless young fellows alike all went weak-kneed in her wake. "I loved her dearly, as many did," recalls Gibbs, who met her in 1968, after she had already married Paul. "She was a sort of wonderful siren, a siren who didn't realize how irresistible she was. She stayed very childlike, although a wounded child."

Kenneth Jay Lane supplied Talitha with dramatic costume jewelry early in his career and also remembers her as one of the "special people" of that Youthquake era. "First of all, she was beautiful," he says, "with that wonderful combination of Indonesian and Dutch heritage. She was marvelous looking and full of charm--and all that money didn't hurt."

Before the marriage, Talitha was known as a model and a budding starlet--even if her most memorable screen appearance was as a pipe-smoking girl alongside Jane Fonda in Barbarella. Afterward, of course, she was lifted into a whole other realm, as the beautiful wife of the son of the man reputed to be the richest in the world. The couple met at a reception in honor of Rudolph Nureyev, where they were introduced by Claus Von Bulow, then a top Getty Oil executive. They married two years later, in December 1966, without the blessing--or even the presence--of J. Paul Getty Sr.

The five-times-married patriarch, whose stinginess was renowned, had already nearly written off his former favorite son, according to Robett Lenzner's 1985 biography The Great Getty. Paul Jr. had studied music, literature and the arts in college and seemed temperamentally unsuited to a position in the family business. Still, his flinty father placed him at the head of Getty's Italian operations until, in 1965, after the office had been losing money for years, he fired his son. Paul, however, was already dipping into the fast life in Rome, and he soon ditched his first wife, Gail, and their four children (among them John Paul Getty III, who was later kidnapped and ransomed only after his right ear was sliced off and mailed to the family).
Talitha was just the partner Paul needed to pursue his wild pleasures. After a honeymoon in Morocco--when they bought their Marrakech palace, now owned by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy--the couple moved into the 17th-century palazzo Mutti-Bussi in Rome. "They were living in an amazing house with a terrace which she made very Marrakech," remembers Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino's business partner. "She was always wearing turbans and caftans and long scarves. She was a very free person. She was a shocking force for such a provincial city as Rome. In London, she could be one of them. In Rome, she was the one."

The Rome apartment was a delirious setting that reflected Talitha's own eclectic style. One magazine of the day described it as having the exotic, decadent feel of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer. Its mix of Venetian furniture, William Morris wallpaper, Art Nouveau fixtures, Balinese umbrellas and elephant-saddle chairs was created by American expatriate Bill Willis. Willis, one of the couple's closest friends, also traveled with them a trois on their honeymoon and subsequently decorated their house there. Today in frail health, he still lives in Marrakech but refused to be interviewed for this story. So did their friend Prince Dado Ruspoli, who said in a sad voice that he'd rather not revisit those days.

During their heyday, however, Paul was positively enchanted by his second wife and called her his "wild bird." He may have been thinking about the jewel-bright birds that flitted about in Bali, but Talitha was a wild bird in another sense, as well--a sense that would have been understood on the King's Road. Nigel Waymouth, who outfitted London's rock royalty at his boutique Granny Takes a Trip, remembers seeing her late one night at Spanish Tony's, a nightclub briefly run by the Rolling Stones.

"Talitha, wearing a floor-length sable coat, sashayed in with Paul and came over to us," he recalls. "She said, Hi, boys,' and then sat down and took off her coat, revealing that underneath she had on only a fishnet dress. It was quite an entrance. She had style with a vengeance."

The couple's rollicking friendship with the Stones continued at parties at the Marrakech palace, photographed by Horst for Vogue. It wasn't a secret-then or now-that drugs were part of their life. "She was out and about in the world," says Gibbs when asked about Talitha's drug use. "It was a perfectly natural thing. Drugs were around--as they are now--but people didn't know so much about them then. It was...fun. It was part of being a sophisticated young person.

The Gettys' fast-paced life took them aboard German steel magnate Arndt Krupp's yacht in the Mediterranean, where Talitha was spotted on deck in a skintight diving suit with a knife strapped to her leg. But when the couple disembarked from the yacht to stay with Diane and Egon von Furstenberg in the summer of 1969, they also showed a gentler-if still somewhat spaced-out--side.

"She and Paul stayed at my house," recalls Diane Von Furstenberg, "and we spent one evening gazing at the stars. He wrote a poem. She was enchanting and beautiful and graceful. She was very ethereal--all light."
That same year, Talitha had her only child and named him Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramaphone Getty, to the outrage of the old man back in Britain. (Gramaphone, as he's called, now cares for the Getty family's nature preserves in South Africa and has named his yacht Talitha Gin his mother's honor.) When talitha appeared in French Vogue, barely covered by a scanty animal-print number, Getty Sr. threatened to cut them off.

"This is not worthy of a Getty," he stormed. "I have to prevent that such a thing occurs again. Otherwise I shall disinherit my son. I will not allow that my name he dragged into the mud." Talitha responded in the press, "Who would imagine that he is so prudish?"

After the birth of her son, however, Talitha's wild life seemed to tilt over the edge from the fantastic to the grotesque. Like a freaky Marie Antoinette, she gave a Christmas party in a pigsty in Rome. She hung out with the real hippies along the Spanish Steps, carrying Gramaphone on her hack like a papoose. She even returned to London without her husband and had affairs with other men, while changing her official Rome address from the Palazzo Mutti-Bussi to the Dutch embassy there.

She returned to her husband's side in an apparent reconciliation in July of 1971--but on the 11th, after a mysterious night that has never been explained, an ambulance appeared to whisk Talitha away to a clinic, where she died the following day, of what seemed to be a barbituate overdose. But six months later, her cause of death was officially declared to be a heroin overdose. "She was completely enchanting, but somehow a bit damaged by things that had happened early in her life," adds Gibbs, speculating that her own psychological or even physiological weaknesses were to blame for her ultimately fatal drug use.

Along with other late-Sixties figures, Talitha has been mythologized by some because she never lived long enough to mellow into middle age. Philo admits that the overindulgence has a certain appeal. "It's part of the decadence: You can imagine her waking up and feeling quite terrible hut not having to worry about it, because she didn't have to work," the designer explains. "It's lovely as a fantasy, but I don't really admire it as a life."

But for others who lived through that time, the Talitha story is finally a cautionary tale of lost innocence. "She became a victim," says Von Furstenberg ruefully "When I first saw pictures of her, I thought, How glamorous. Then I met her and discovered a very bright creature who wanted to dance under the stars--and danced too fast."

COPYRIGHT 2001 Fairchild Publications, Inc.

__________________

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." - Oscar Wilde

I'm very interested in Talita Getty and the rock-fashion crowd of the late 60's and early 70's. I read Marianne Faithfull's biography and The Beautiful Fall recently and they were both very interesting. If any of you have any book recommendations about this period, I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks

Thank you 60WildChild for the article. I do not know much about Talitha Getty but from what I have learn, she has a very tragic and interesting story. My favorite photo is the one on those Maroc rooftop. Beautifull.

Wild Child: Thirty years after her death, the spirit of the young, stylish, improbably beautiful Talitha Getty wafts through the spring collections in an aura of sandalwood and champagne.

From: W | Date: December 1, 2001 | Author: West, Kevin
Today she would be 60, and no doubt still attractive, in the way that those rare women are who don't need the mere dew of youth in order to captivate. But in the late Sixties, Talitha Getty was an irresistible beauty with an antelope grace, almond-shaped eyes and a mercurial sense of style. She donned dramatic kimonos and shoulder-sweeping earrings to pad barefoot across the black-and-white marble floors of the Roman palazzo apartment she created with her husband, J. Paul Getty Jr., a son of Getty Oil founder John Paul Getty During their few years together, the young Gettys--with their dazzling combination of beauty, charm, money, style and notoriety--blew across Europe as the freest spirits in an age of free spirits.

A single picture tells the story best. On the roof of their Marrakech palace, Paul stands in the background in a djellaba and Talitha lounges in a flowing caftan and gaucho pants--probably stoned out of her mind on everything the Sixties had to offer--as Patrick Lichfield captures images that were to define the decadent fantasy of the rich hippie. It was a style she made her own, tossing together Yves Saint Laurent, Palestinian wedding dresses, Ossie Clark, Valentino couture, Balinese wraps, little white leather boots and piles of fake jewelry with a bohemian aplomb that Kate Moss might envy Diana Vreeland thought she was terrific.

But it didn't last long. Talitha's incandescent flight among the stars of La Dolce Vita and Swinging London burnt out in 1971, when she died in Rome of a heroin overdose. "I knew the youthfulness of the Sixties," Saint Laurent said in 1984. "Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakech, beautiful and damned, and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future."
This season, their spirit is back in the European collections. Talitha was clearly the woman afoot on the runways at Chloe and Dries Van Noten. From the obscurity of a half-remembered Sixties beauty, she had been resurrected as the muse of the season. At Chloe, Phoebe Philo created a tiny, monkey-embroidered bikini and some abbreviated crocheted dresses that Talitha might have worn, while Van Noten, for his part, registered her influence with djellabas and layered dresses. At Yves Saint Laurent, Tom Ford showed some leopard-patterned dresses and caftans that suggested her style, as did some of Marc Jacobs' evening looks for Louis Vuitton.

Philo wasn't even born until two years after Talitha's death, but she, too, had memorized that iconic image of Talitha and Getty on the roof in Marrakech. If anything, the designer says, she initially resisted building a collection around the photo because it was already so famous. "She's a little bit like Jackie O, in that she's an obvious reference to use because we all know it so well," says Philo. She wanted to give her Chloe presentation, held at the Carreau du Temple in Paris' Marais neighborhood, the "sexy but slightly dirty" feel of travel to exotic destinations.

But as she combed through pictures of the Gettys abroad, Philo started to spin out a glamorous fashion movie, based on the true story of Talitha. Her distinctive taste might be called "couture in the souks" because, despite her friendships with Saint Laurent and Valentino, Talitha never let any one designer take control of her wardrobe. "That makes her more attractive as a muse," Philo explains. "When you use Audrey Hepburn, who was so linked with Givenchy, you feel like you're copying another designer instead of using her own personal style. Talitha didn't seem to wear head-to-toe looks. She mixed and matched."

Above all, it was the whole rich-hippie lifestyle that gave Philo the most inspiration. One of her favorite images was of Talitha and Getty in a Mediterranean village where, the designer thought, they may--or may not--have crossed paths with another Chloe muse of the season, Brigitte Bardot. "I guess you could say that I got carried away with Talitha's character," acknowledges Philo. "Not that all of what I imagined about her was even true. I used her more as a fantasy to dream about."

Still, the bare facts of Talitha's life are fantastic enough, even by the trippy standards of the Sixties. She could have been a Godard heroine--or some far-out chick dreamed up by Antonioni. She was born Talitha Pol on Bali of Dutch parents (her grandfather was painter Augustus John). According to London antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, who was among the Gettys' dose friends in the late Sixties, she was briefly held in an internment camp as a child and came to London only after her mother died, to be raised in a bohemian milieu by her father's new wife's family.

In her childhood, Talitha seems to have imbibed an exotic sensuality from the East. In England, she learned to be wild, and when she hit the heady scene there as a teenager, wise old men and feckless young fellows alike all went weak-kneed in her wake. "I loved her dearly, as many did," recalls Gibbs, who met her in 1968, after she had already married Paul. "She was a sort of wonderful siren, a siren who didn't realize how irresistible she was. She stayed very childlike, although a wounded child."

Kenneth Jay Lane supplied Talitha with dramatic costume jewelry early in his career and also remembers her as one of the "special people" of that Youthquake era. "First of all, she was beautiful," he says, "with that wonderful combination of Indonesian and Dutch heritage. She was marvelous looking and full of charm--and all that money didn't hurt."

Before the marriage, Talitha was known as a model and a budding starlet--even if her most memorable screen appearance was as a pipe-smoking girl alongside Jane Fonda in Barbarella. Afterward, of course, she was lifted into a whole other realm, as the beautiful wife of the son of the man reputed to be the richest in the world. The couple met at a reception in honor of Rudolph Nureyev, where they were introduced by Claus Von Bulow, then a top Getty Oil executive. They married two years later, in December 1966, without the blessing--or even the presence--of J. Paul Getty Sr.

The five-times-married patriarch, whose stinginess was renowned, had already nearly written off his former favorite son, according to Robett Lenzner's 1985 biography The Great Getty. Paul Jr. had studied music, literature and the arts in college and seemed temperamentally unsuited to a position in the family business. Still, his flinty father placed him at the head of Getty's Italian operations until, in 1965, after the office had been losing money for years, he fired his son. Paul, however, was already dipping into the fast life in Rome, and he soon ditched his first wife, Gail, and their four children (among them John Paul Getty III, who was later kidnapped and ransomed only after his right ear was sliced off and mailed to the family).
Talitha was just the partner Paul needed to pursue his wild pleasures. After a honeymoon in Morocco--when they bought their Marrakech palace, now owned by French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy--the couple moved into the 17th-century palazzo Mutti-Bussi in Rome. "They were living in an amazing house with a terrace which she made very Marrakech," remembers Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino's business partner. "She was always wearing turbans and caftans and long scarves. She was a very free person. She was a shocking force for such a provincial city as Rome. In London, she could be one of them. In Rome, she was the one."

The Rome apartment was a delirious setting that reflected Talitha's own eclectic style. One magazine of the day described it as having the exotic, decadent feel of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer. Its mix of Venetian furniture, William Morris wallpaper, Art Nouveau fixtures, Balinese umbrellas and elephant-saddle chairs was created by American expatriate Bill Willis. Willis, one of the couple's closest friends, also traveled with them a trois on their honeymoon and subsequently decorated their house there. Today in frail health, he still lives in Marrakech but refused to be interviewed for this story. So did their friend Prince Dado Ruspoli, who said in a sad voice that he'd rather not revisit those days.

During their heyday, however, Paul was positively enchanted by his second wife and called her his "wild bird." He may have been thinking about the jewel-bright birds that flitted about in Bali, but Talitha was a wild bird in another sense, as well--a sense that would have been understood on the King's Road. Nigel Waymouth, who outfitted London's rock royalty at his boutique Granny Takes a Trip, remembers seeing her late one night at Spanish Tony's, a nightclub briefly run by the Rolling Stones.

"Talitha, wearing a floor-length sable coat, sashayed in with Paul and came over to us," he recalls. "She said, Hi, boys,' and then sat down and took off her coat, revealing that underneath she had on only a fishnet dress. It was quite an entrance. She had style with a vengeance."

The couple's rollicking friendship with the Stones continued at parties at the Marrakech palace, photographed by Horst for Vogue. It wasn't a secret-then or now-that drugs were part of their life. "She was out and about in the world," says Gibbs when asked about Talitha's drug use. "It was a perfectly natural thing. Drugs were around--as they are now--but people didn't know so much about them then. It was...fun. It was part of being a sophisticated young person.

The Gettys' fast-paced life took them aboard German steel magnate Arndt Krupp's yacht in the Mediterranean, where Talitha was spotted on deck in a skintight diving suit with a knife strapped to her leg. But when the couple disembarked from the yacht to stay with Diane and Egon von Furstenberg in the summer of 1969, they also showed a gentler-if still somewhat spaced-out--side.

"She and Paul stayed at my house," recalls Diane Von Furstenberg, "and we spent one evening gazing at the stars. He wrote a poem. She was enchanting and beautiful and graceful. She was very ethereal--all light."
That same year, Talitha had her only child and named him Tara Gabriel Galaxy Gramaphone Getty, to the outrage of the old man back in Britain. (Gramaphone, as he's called, now cares for the Getty family's nature preserves in South Africa and has named his yacht Talitha Gin his mother's honor.) When talitha appeared in French Vogue, barely covered by a scanty animal-print number, Getty Sr. threatened to cut them off.

"This is not worthy of a Getty," he stormed. "I have to prevent that such a thing occurs again. Otherwise I shall disinherit my son. I will not allow that my name he dragged into the mud." Talitha responded in the press, "Who would imagine that he is so prudish?"

After the birth of her son, however, Talitha's wild life seemed to tilt over the edge from the fantastic to the grotesque. Like a freaky Marie Antoinette, she gave a Christmas party in a pigsty in Rome. She hung out with the real hippies along the Spanish Steps, carrying Gramaphone on her hack like a papoose. She even returned to London without her husband and had affairs with other men, while changing her official Rome address from the Palazzo Mutti-Bussi to the Dutch embassy there.

She returned to her husband's side in an apparent reconciliation in July of 1971--but on the 11th, after a mysterious night that has never been explained, an ambulance appeared to whisk Talitha away to a clinic, where she died the following day, of what seemed to be a barbituate overdose. But six months later, her cause of death was officially declared to be a heroin overdose. "She was completely enchanting, but somehow a bit damaged by things that had happened early in her life," adds Gibbs, speculating that her own psychological or even physiological weaknesses were to blame for her ultimately fatal drug use.

Along with other late-Sixties figures, Talitha has been mythologized by some because she never lived long enough to mellow into middle age. Philo admits that the overindulgence has a certain appeal. "It's part of the decadence: You can imagine her waking up and feeling quite terrible hut not having to worry about it, because she didn't have to work," the designer explains. "It's lovely as a fantasy, but I don't really admire it as a life."

But for others who lived through that time, the Talitha story is finally a cautionary tale of lost innocence. "She became a victim," says Von Furstenberg ruefully "When I first saw pictures of her, I thought, How glamorous. Then I met her and discovered a very bright creature who wanted to dance under the stars--and danced too fast."

COPYRIGHT 2001 Fairchild Publications, Inc.

That quote from Diane Von Furstenberg is seriously one of the most beautiful things I have heard in a while. It describes her perfectly, along with so many others of the time.

__________________
“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”